Friday, March 14, 2014

Dolphin Sofa

This first image is the Zbrush model rendered with Keyshot. The following 4 images show the 10"long Shapeways SLS 3d print. As you can see, it's a remarkably true to the model. It does however, have a bit of a tooth to it. Shapeways offers this material polished in a tumbler but, that process is reserved for print outs that are 200mm (about 7.5") or, less.

Sofas and couches come in all shapes and size but, this was a new one for me. I was contacted by Eric Winston, owner of SFDS, a fantastic, 15,000 square foot scene fabrication/design studio in the heart of Greenpoint Brooklyn. Eric needed among some other wonderful elements, a 10’ long, hand carved dolphin sofa for the Marriott Vacation Club in Newport Coast CA. I jumped at the chance. I’d been wanting to do a crazy sofa for as long as I could remember. I’ve done all sorts of crazy chairs, tables, cabinets and beds for as long as I’ve been sculpting but, in all of the that time, never a sofa. Eric cleared a huge room for me to sculpt it in. His excellent fabrication staff built a hotwire table for me from no more than one of my napkin sketches and boom, it began.

Half way into the carve, Eric's studio was visited by Mario Marsicano from Jellio. I've worked with Jellio on a number of interesting projects. I knew that Eric did projects with Jellio but, I didn't know that the sofa was one of them. There were so many diverse projects going on in the studio at the time, 2 major stage sets, a big job for instagram, giant wooden dinosaur assemblies, all sorts of different furniture designs, as far as I knew I was sculpting Eric and the Marriott. Finding out that this was for Jellio once my hands were already deeply into it was an additional bonus. For more with Jellio, click on the following links.Gummi KingIce Cream That You Can Sit OnKing Kong

Eric's 5 year old angel, Ella.

The above images show the sofa from various angles, carved, filled and ready for hard coating. The project progressed at a very fast rate due in largest part to my having figured out the sculpture in Zbrush. I have always done models in the past for larger sculpts. The luxury of doing models in Zbrush, as opposed to a more traditional clay approach is that you end up with a model that is not only more easily editable but, all of my build elevations were derived from it as well. The elevations were simply projected onto the block from different sides and the sculpture was immediately roughed out, top to bottom, side to side, front to back.

An astute eye may notice that the sofa against the grid only measures 9'. In order to increase the seating area, during the projection, the length of the sofa would be stretched to 10'. As a result, everything changed a bit but, all for the better. In a very long career, this was well worth the wait. In the wonderful world of fanciful furniture, this is an example as fabulously fun as you could hope to fathomably find.